Quote:Maybe I should have just said that forms and katas were very good breath control. And kept my beliefs that forms are a good way to meditate to myself!!

Why be so easily defeated?

You have unknowingly touched on something which is deeper than you know, but being at the moment only at a suface level of the art, you could not express it cogently enough and so being made to feel you were talking over your head.

"Moving Meditation" has been thrown around for a while now (mostly by Tai Chi Chuan practitioners) I have a cousin who is a doctor / consultant radiologist. He studied Tai Chi for a while and starting talking about MM. I said there is no need to talk about it; if you can do, you would not be talking about it because you will know very very few people will understand what it is you are talking about and so feel it is a waste of time.

So I said to him, you have no idea what exactly MM is right? and he said yes, but it is something Tai Chi can give you? I said Tai Chi as practiced in the parks and community halls where you just do the Forms, some push-hands, will not give you that, even if you keep at it for 20 years. It can give you good health yes; it can even slow down the aging process and give you a skin as smooth and supple as a baby, but it will not give you MM.

So what is MM?

This was my answer to him. On one level it is actually quite simple. Most people would associate meditaton as sitting crossed-legged, eyes closed and concentrate (at the beginner's stage on your breathing) But at the advanced level, meditation, whether sitted or standing (e.g. zhan zhuang) allows you to achieve conscious control of the circulation of the chi in your body. Then while 'holding' that meditative state and circulating your chi, do the Tai Chi or Hsing Yi or Bagua or any other slow forms; the actual form or sequence of the movements is not important at all; what is important is that you can consciously circulate your chi while doing the movements. It is the combination of the conscious circulation of the chi and bodily movements that gives you MM.

So you are now meditating and moving at the same time, albeit at a slow Tai Chi pace. The ultimate gaol is to be able to 'hold' that meditative state and do fast movements; something I am working towards at the moment.

In another Thread I said I was working on what I thought was a new internal system which has no technical forms, like Tai Chi or Hsing Yi (which are difficult to apply in actual combat) but utilising only the chi enhanced bodily movements (through the practice of MM) to counter any kind of attack, without using any specific combat technique. I later found out (to my disappointment) that Wang Siang Chai (the founder of Yi Chuan) got there first. It was his disappointment with the overly tight form-controlled system like Hsing Yi which got him to look for a better way and founded Yi Chuan, which do away completely with any concern for strict correctness of form (something which Tai Chi people or rather their instructors are obsessed with, thinking perhaps that the Form, if done absolutely correctly, is the vehicle that carries you along to chi development, whereas it is actually the chi, after it is being developed, which gives substance and meaning to your Form)

Though I've never met him, I knew exactly what he (Wang Siang Chai) was thinking and why he came up with Yi Chuan because anyone who goes down the same road will inevitably come to the same conclusion, as I did, albeit one step behind.

This topic, depending on the participants, can range very far from MA...or MA is just one part of it. Discussing the full range of the topic is not possible in any one of the threads...and I suspect would be very misunderstood by most.